Bresson has recreated the novel [Journal d'un Curé de Campagne], not simply made an adaptation of it in the conventional manner. He has been concerned to seek out the central core of the book—the spiritual development of the young country priest—and prune all the side issues not directly related to this main theme (but which are nonetheless an essential part of the novel), thereby intensifying the story and giving it the purity of a Racinean tragedy. (p. 128)

The director's personality is to be felt too in the film's tone: all the emotions are muted and there is a lack of violence or passion…. This continual understating of the emotions, together with the hero's essentially passive submission to God's will, gives the film its particular rhythm and makes the death of the Curé a real climax. (pp. 129-30)

[Again, in Un Condamné à mort s'est échappé] Bresson concentrates on his single theme, the prison escape planned and executed by the hero (here known as Lieutenant Fontaine), and all that is irrelevant to this is omitted. For this reason we learn nothing of the prisoner's antecedents or even the reasons why he is in prison; we can see what sort of a man he is from his actions and this suffices. (p. 130)

The whole film has an evenness of tone that marks it as the product of one man's personality. Fontaine has remarkable similarities with the Curé d'Ambricourt: he is intelligent, withdrawn, in control of himself even in moments of crisis and endowed with considerable force of character which allows him to impose his will on his fellow men and his physical surroundings. Confidently he awaits the success of his plan, and this calm passivity gives the film its rhythm and atmosphere. (p. 131)

Pickpocket takes us more into the ordinary everyday world than before, among the crowds at race meetings, in underground trains and at railway stations…. But this is a world where God plays no part, where the hero's life is without spiritual meaning, and in this repect it is the antithesis of the prison world of Fort Montluc in the previous film. The hero's inner life is once more the core of the film and the real drama is the struggle that goes on behind Michel's emotionless face. Bresson has no interest in individual psychology except in so far as it illustrates the workings of the Divine Will and little motivation is offered for the Pickpocket's acts…. [His] virtual surrender to justice is Michel's first act of submission and leads directly to his salvation. His love for Jeanne, which is the means of this redemption, introduces a new element into the Bresson world…. The love of Michel and Jeanne, though serving as the film's culmination, is muted, with no effusion of emotion shown, and it is typical of the film's treatment of love that their last embrace is through the bars imprisoning Michel. (pp. 132, 134)

[In Procès de Jeanne d'Arc] Bresson is faced with a new challenge: in his previous films he had taken life in all its vigour and diversity, and distilled from it a single thread of action; in this film he attempts to breathe life into the historical documents which record the minutes of Joan's trial. For Bresson, with his eternal quest for authenticity, these are the only possible sources for his film and he allows himself to invent nothing…. Bresson's fidelity to recorded fact means that he has to do without one element that had been as essential part of the earlier films: the voice of a narrator. Words are as important in Procès de Jeanne d'Arc as in the preceding works but their function is different. Whereas previously they had shown an inner struggle and conflict, here they record an outward clash: Joan's verbal duel with Bishop Cauchon. This is perhaps a key to the peculiar coldness of the film. Journal d'un Curé de Campagne was near to tragedy in its chronicling of the doubts and hesitations of a terribly vulnerable young priest, but Joan of Arc, as Bresson sees her, has virtually no doubts or regrets at leaving this world; she is content, such is the strength of her faith, to submit herself totally to God's will. The resolute march of a saint to martyrdom may fill us with awe, but we do not feel any personal involvement with her.

Stylistically the film shows Bresson at his most austere. (p. 134)

[Au Hasard, Balthazar] not only forged a fresh stylistic approach, it also covered a new range of material with an inclusiveness that the earlier works had lacked. It takes in jazz and teenage dancing, violence and nudity, cruelty and leather-clad motorcyclists while still preserving a Bressonian atmosphere. The director contrives to distance this material by means of a film structure that achieves an effect of de-dramatisation by breaking the action into a succession of tiny elliptical scenes connected in ways that are not immediately apparent. The film has the richness of plot of a Dostoievskian story and an added element of strangeness in that its eponymous hero is a donkey. (p. 136)

The film's distinctive mixture of obscure meaning (the donkey) and quite blatant symbolism (Gérard's leather jacket and motor bike) is held together by Bresson's extraordinary stylistic control. Characteristic Bresson touches such as the use of Schubert's music and the uniform style of gesture and enunciation—this is a film in which dialogue is rare and the silences are most meaningful—are combined in Au Hasard, Balthazar with moments of a quite unique unreality: the donkey in a deserted house or amid traffic, amid the sheep on the mountain-side or confronted with the animals in the zoo. The vision which emerges is that of a world of Dostoievskian corruption where evil flourishes and secret vices eat at the hearts of men. In following the course of Balthazar's life we encounter obliquely a whole wealth of worldly experience—the death of a child, pride and the quarrel of friends, pure destructiveness, lust, amour fou, avarice, humiliation, crime and death—and Bresson presents us with a world where simple love and laughter vanish with childhood but grace is never absent….

The film Mouchette, like the previous work, traces the experience of a whole life-time but obliquely in a succession of fragmentary shots and scenes welded in an almost musical rhythm. The fourteen-year-old heroine does not have to seek humiliation, it comes her way spontaneously. (p. 137)

As in all his mature work, Bresson's personality is imprinted on every foot of Mouchette. This domination was achieved at the expense of his actors, as the painter Jean Vimenet (who played the gamekeeper) has pointed out: "None of us was ever aware of what was going on. He would not allow us to look at the script or see the photos taken in the course of shooting … He uses people like objects. He leaves absolutely nothing to their imagination: every detail, every gesture, every millimetre of movement of a finger or nose, your nose is in this position, you look in this direction, every indication is given down to the smallest detail by Bresson himself. You have nothing to contribute; you are a robot, you are put in a certain position and you remain like that. At a certain moment you have to turn your head …" Vimenet's words make clear how the distinctive acting style of Bresson's work is achieved but do little to illuminate the more mysterious aspects of his art: the ability to remain faithful to a literary source and yet produce a work that is wholly his own, to shoot with nonprofessional actors on location and yet give his film an air of the supernatural, to insist on total realism at every stage and yet achieve a result that is a marvel of stylisation. (pp. 138-39)

Taken as a whole, Bresson's characters show a unique coherence and constitute a profound investigation into the workings of divine grace in a life lived under the shadow of death. (p. 145)